The most pressing concerns for consumer packaged goods companies today are transportation and network redesign - priorities that just two years ago barely registered on their radar, according to a report by The Boston Consulting Group and the Grocery Manufacturers Association.
It has been roughly four decades since industrial robots - with mechanical arms that can be programmed to weld, paint and pick up and place objects with monotonous regularity - first began to transform assembly lines in Europe, Japan and the U.S. Yet walk the floor of any manufacturer, from metal shops to electronics factories, and you might be surprised by how many tasks are still performed by human hands - even some that could be done by machines.
Industrial production was transformed by steam power in the nineteenth century, electricity in the early twentieth century, and automation in the 1970s. These waves of technological advancement did not reduce overall employment, however. Although the number of manufacturing jobs decreased, new jobs emerged and the demand for new skills grew. Today, another workforce transformation is on the horizon as manufacturing experiences a fourth wave of technological advancement: the rise of new digital industrial technologies that are collectively known as Industry 4.0.
It has been roughly four decades since industrial robots - with mechanical arms that can be programmed to weld, paint and pick up and place objects with monotonous regularity - first began to transform assembly lines in Europe, Japan and the U.S. Yet walk the floor of any manufacturer, from metal shops to electronics factories, and you might be surprised by how many tasks are still performed by human hands - even some that could be done by machines.
The widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles (AVs) could eliminate the more than 30,000 annual U.S. road fatalities, improve travel time by as much as 40 percent, recover up to 80 billion hours lost to commuting and congestion, and reduce fuel consumption by as much as 40 percent.
The conventional view is that consumers are fickle and inconsistent, hard to understand and predict, and therefore unmanageable. In fact, they are perfectly consistent, perfectly understandable, and quite predictable.
Brick-and-mortar retailers - including supermarkets, discounters, drugstores and mass merchandisers - rely heavily on promotions, which typically account for 10 to 45 percent of their total revenues. Although promotions are a powerful instrument for increasing sales and margin, they are also difficult to use effectively.
Despite the well-publicized slowdown in economic growth, overall consumer sentiment in China can still be described as cautiously optimistic. More precisely, caution characterizes the lower end of the consumer market, while optimism envelops the high end. China, in other words, has become a two-speed consumer market. The optimistic, "high-speed" consumer market disproportionately consists of middle- to upper-middle-class and affluent households. These consumers also make up the bulk of the digital class of active online shoppers.
Many vital infrastructure projects struggle to progress beyond the concept stage because project preparation is such a costly, complex and risky undertaking. The difficulty is particularly acute in Africa, where projects encounter frequent challenges related to capabilities, the regulatory environment, project governance and financial resources.
